For decades, use of unmanned vehicles, such as unmanned aircraft systems (generally referred to as drones), has been increasing as delivery, sensor, and automation technologies mature. One advantage of unmanned vehicles is the ability to establish large areas of operation with a significantly reduced number of people than would be required for a manned enterprise. Another advantage is the ability to deploy unmanned systems into operational environments that are hostile or dangerous to human beings.
The United States military is increasing its use of unmanned vehicles by all service branches and in all theaters of operation. Current examples of planned uses of unmanned vehicles in marine and submarine environments are for mine and submarine detection, maritime interdiction missions, harbor security, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The commercial market also is also experiencing increased use of unmanned vehicles. Current examples of such use include search and rescue, drug interdiction, remote launch and recovery of external payloads, autonomous environmental testing, oil spill collection and monitoring, weather monitoring, and real time tsunami data collection and monitoring. The scope of both military and civilian uses for unmanned vehicles is expected to continue to increase significantly in the coming decade.
Conventional unmanned vehicle designs typically are each limited in scope to a particular operating environment and/or beneficial task. In the marine and submarine environments, most current unmanned vehicle designs are based on retrofits of manned vehicle designs and, as result, incur operational and performance envelope limitations built into vehicles designed for carrying people, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,789,723 to Dane et. al. Alternatively, systems designed specifically as unmanned vehicles, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,807,921 to Huntsman, typically are configured to achieve particular characteristics that are conducive to accomplishing a task of interest, such as, for example, endurance or underwater performance. However, these designs typically preclude achievement of a broader range of unmanned vehicle characteristics (e.g., multi-environment, multi-task) for the sake of limited-environment, limited-task characteristics.
In addition to the limitations inherent to vehicle design, challenges exist in design of command and control systems required to effectively operate both individual unmanned systems and also groups of such systems operating cooperatively toward accomplishment of a common objective. Typical mission planning and control systems for unmanned systems often include various approaches to design into the controlled vehicles some degree of autonomous operations in order to reduce the amount of human-in-the-loop decision making. Emerging communications technologies, advancing computing power, and increasing energy storage density have contributed to enabling small autonomous vessels to operate over large global distances with the ability to coordinate their transit routes from a central location. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,765,038 to Appleby et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 8,060,270 to Vian et al. However, limitations in the capabilities of the unmanned vehicles being controlled by conventional command and control systems often limit the problems that may be solved using those systems. More specifically, no existing system accounts for controlled unmanned vehicles that are each capable of selective operation in air, on the surface of water, and underwater.
A need exists for a combination of multi-mode operational characteristics and integrated systems to provide for a controllable autonomous network of unmanned maritime vehicles capable of covering large areas of diverse environments, whether in the air, on the surface of the water, or underwater. A need also exists to advance the state of the art of unmanned vehicles by enabling fewer people to execute more complex missions over larger operational areas.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.